Live Chat: David Denby and Richard Brody on the Oscars

This week in the magazine, David Denby writes about silent films. On Thursday, Denby and Richard Brody answered readers’ questions about the Oscars in a live chat. Read a transcript of the discussion in the console below.

THE NEW YORKER: David Denby and Richard Brody will join us in just a moment. For now, please submit your questions.

QUESTION FROM JORDAN: If you could have a new category created at the Oscars, what would it be?

RICHARD BRODY: Best Overall Cast. A movie such as Cedar Rapids or Margaret (yes, Margaret—let’s talk about it later) has a great cast; The Descendants too. The group should be acknowledged.

DAVID DENBY: Oh, maybe best first film, in which case “Margin Call,” with its extraordinary ensemble acting, would have won an award—well, it may win best screenplay.

RICHARD BRODY: I agree, David—Best First Film would be a good category; though I’m not sure that Margin Call would be the one.

QUESTION FROM GUEST: How long have the Oscars played this particular role as the object of cultural obsession? Was it always this way?

DAVID DENBY: Overall cast is a good idea; “Margin Call” scores there, too. I saw Kevin Spacey in Richard III, tearing up the stage, and what he does in “Margin Call” is so utterly gentle and weary and interior, I was stunned.

RICHARD BRODY: Certainly, the Oscars weren’t so important in the early days. Of course, television broadcast has had a lot to do with it; so has the overall importance of media, the seemingly (I say, seemingly—I don’t know first-hand how things were before the seventies) greater emphasis on celebrity in modern life.

DAVID DENBY: As marketing forces plus the other awards, plus the year-end loading of quality has increased, they have become both more an obsession and more an object of disgust. One of the oddities is that the people voting in the Academy don’t for the most part, work on the kind of movies that they respect. A peculiar disjunction built into the event, as if the industry wanted redemption from marketing and cynicism

RICHARD BRODY: I don’t think it’s cynical. For instance, I think that many actors and many directors are prepared to take serious pay cuts (temporarily) in order to make movies they care about. And sometimes those movies actually get nominated for Oscars; what’s wrong with having ideals?

QUESTION FROM CHRIS SHERMAN: Tree of Life had all the trappings of an Oscar film, that’s for sure (the cast, the setting, the soundscape, the way it was shot). Do you think it deserves the nomination? Or is it just there because it was always intended to be?

RICHARD BRODY: Tree of Life is such a singular and personal movie, it’s hard to imagine that it was made in order to contend for an Oscar. The fact that people are members of the Academy doesn’t necessarily make them immune to good movies; after all, recent nominees have included The Social Network, Black Swan, Lost in Translation. But of course, the best nominees don’t necessarily (don’t often) win.

DAVID DENBY: Oh, I think, exasperating as some of it is, that it’s a genuinely great movie. It pushes the boundaries of film language; it attempts something of enormous metaphysical audacity—to encapsulate all of life, all of creation and destruction, in the life of a single family living in a small town in Texas in the fifties and sixties.

QUESTION FROM MEGAN STILLSON: Thanks so much for talking to us today. It has been a few years, how do you both think that the expanded list of Best Picture nominees is working?

DAVID DENBY: Last year’s award for the tepid “King’s Speech” showed how cautious and, well, elderly the voting members are. “The Social Network” was easily the most exciting movie of the year.

DAVID DENBY: If it’s helping a few independent movies with a limited audience to get into the best-picture category, I’m all for it.

RICHARD BRODY: It seems to be working fairly well—the list of nine, the list of ten, include movies that, in earlier years, might not have been nominated; it allows a small and impassioned group of Academy members to reflect that passion, and passion is a good thing when it comes to movies.

QUESTION FROM DAVE: Do you think we’ll see a resurgence in silent filmmaking, or is it too specialized an artform?

RICHARD BRODY: What’s good about The Artist is that it was made by someone who had the overwhelming desire to make it. Nobody could make such a film with commercial calculations in mind; it wasn’t an easy movie to get financed, and I doubt that someone who wanted to follow up on the success of The Artist could do so cynically. I’m reminded of owning a 45 record by The Buggs from 1964. It wasn’t a hit.

DAVID DENBY: I would be happy to see a resurgence of proper exhibition of silent film. When you see them at the right speed, and with live music, they can be overwhelming. Even Kino among the DVD distributors transfers them at the wrong speed, which, I have the feeling, is fixable with digital technology.

RICHARD BRODY: But as for a revival of interest in watching silent movies made in earlier times, let’s hope that this is what happens. I doubt it. Cinephiles will continue to care; there may be a spate of broadcasts or releases, and that’s all to the good. But it’s a bigger problem when good new releases don’t get seen widely.

DAVID DENBY: Yes, the best thing about “The Artist” is that it exists at all. I wish, however, they hadn’t acquiesced in the audience’s prior belief that silent movies were quaint and trivial. Of course, “Singin’ in the Rain” did the same thing sixty years ago, but that’s a great movie and “The Artist” is a genial stunt.

QUESTION FROM GARY MCMAHON: Isn’t it equally exasperating when really great performances like Michael Fassbender in Shame and Woody Harrelson in Rampart are ignored completely?

DAVID DENBY: Agree, it’s a bigger problem when good new releases don’t get seen widely. Theatrical openings are crushingly expensive, the audience is wary, critics can turn themselves blue in the face pushing films from Iran or China, but the audience sometimes just doesn’t want to go. Even European films . Forty years ago, “The White Ribbon” would have caused endless debate.

RICHARD BRODY: Everyone inevitably has his or her own exasperations; mine (here we go) concerns Margaret. I believe that, had the studio released Kenneth Lonergan’s film with the conventional vigor (including advertising, longer runs, a more calculated release pattern), it would have won several nominations—Best Picture (it is, in my opinion, one of the year’s three best American films, along with Hugo and The Tree of Life), Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and a host of acting awards (including Best Actress, Anna Paquin; Best Supporting Actress, Jeannie Berlin).

RICHARD BRODY: Of course, the overall question is why it matters. In the long-term influence of the film, the Oscars don’t matter at all; they matter in the short-term fortunes of the people who worked on them. And for artists one cares about, that means a lot.

DAVID DENBY: I think Fassbender was imprisoned by Steve McQueen’s art-school directorial ambitions and religious-masochistic temperament from giving the performance he might have given. Oh, the utter hell of being a single, handsome, well-employed white man in New York. Really, c’mon.

QUESTION FROM JASON: J. Edgar seems to have gotten lost in some of the discussion, I thought it was great in addition to other nominated films. Thoughts on this picture?

RICHARD BRODY: Armie Hammer certainly deserved a Best Supporting Actor nomination (David, you mentioned this on the Charlie Rose show a few weeks ago, and I’m glad you did). I’d have given it a best-picture nomination. I know that there are political issues regarding the movie (earlier this week, writing about Charlie Chaplin, I noticed Hoover’s persecution of that titanic genius, which the movie makes no mention of) but Eastwood has made a big political movie with a fascinating theme—the influence of personal, intimate agonies in the wider political world.

DAVID DENBY: Yes, it was very strong, especially when you think of it side by side with “The Iron Lady.” Leo is a very good actor, I think, and Clint’s take on Hoover was surprisingly gentle without being soft or evasive. I believe in the sexual solution too: He was a repressed guy, not an active homosexual. It feels right to me, and it was beautifully played. How about Armie Hammer? Why wasn’t he nominated? What a charmer!

RICHARD BRODY: J. Edgar is another in Eastwood’s anti-moralistic movies (he took on organized religion in Hereafter; here he’s even tougher on it).

QUESTION FROM JOHN SAPUNOR: Were you surprised by the Melissa McCarthy Bridesmaids nomination? Is there a message or intention behind that nomination?

RICHARD BRODY: It’s good to see comic acting acknowledged; I’d have nominated Kristen Wiig for Best Actress; her performance was transformative; midway through the movie, I forgot that I was watching a funny person playing a sad role and thought I was seeing the birth of a great new melodramatist in the Jennifer Aniston vein (have you seen The Break-Up?).

DAVID DENBY: Let women be bawdy, too, was the message; it’s commercially a good idea. I could have done without the upchuck scene, which Judd Apatow as producer apparently insisted on, but that’s why he’s where he is, and I’m where I am. Agree that Kristen Wiig’s performance takes off in mid-movie. She had that astounding bit on the airplane. Sometimes that woman seems to have no bones.

RICHARD BRODY: For that matter, I’d have nominated Isiah Whitlock, Jr. and Anne Heche for their supporting roles in Cedar Rapids; Alexander Payne produced it, and it’s closer to being an Alexander Payne movie than The Descendants is.

QUESTION FROM ALLISON: Richard your comment about Margaret makes me wonder: what other films, actors, directors or whatnot do you both feel were snubbed this year? And who should they have replaced? (if anyone/thing)

DAVID DENBY: The ruminative quality in Descendants was what makes it a Payne movie, the notion that characters are not moving along a pre-set narrative arc but finding themselves as they go. But “Election” and “Sideways” were stronger fables.

RICHARD BRODY: In the documentary category, it’s astonishing that The Interrupters wasn’t nominated. (There are changes afoot in the documentary nominating process.) Also, my favorite foreign film this year is Certified Copy, the film by Abbas Kiarostami, starring Juliette Binoche and William Shimell. Unfortunately, it came out a year ago; who remembers?

DAVID DENBY: We’ve mentioned Armie Hammer and Kevin Spacey in the supporting category. Albert Brooks was also viciously funny in his gentle arm-slasher routine in “Drive,” one of the more hollowly pretentious pictures of last year.

RICHARD BRODY: Yes, I agree; Albert Brooks’s turn in Drive was brilliant, and I fully expected him to be nominated for it. I think that the movie’s gory violence may have turned lots of Academy members off. It’s not a very good movie, but Brooks’s performance (and, for that matter, Ron Perlman’s) are memorable.

QUESTION FROM KRAYON GILL: Judd Apatow was very vocal on his thoughts that the Academy has been snubbing comedies for too long. Do you believe that a Best Comedy Picture would work as a new category?

DAVID DENBY: Ron Perlman looks like the Piltdown Hoax. What a jaw! What face!

RICHARD BRODY: David, I recently read a very good interview with Ron Perlman in a French paper; he built that part up. He started out doing stand-up comedy; and he brings real pathos to that Shylock-like monologue.

DAVID DENBY: No, not a separate category—that sounds like the Golden Globes, which invents extra categories so they can kind more asses to kiss. Comedy just needs to be taken as seriously as drama. Even Woody Allen has said that it’s not the grown-up table. “The Lady Eve” not the gown-up table? Apatow’s “Funny People” was one of the most interesting movies a few years ago, and the press (though not around here) scorned it for not going through the roof commercially. Discouraging.

RICHARD BRODY: @Krayon Gill: That’s a good question about comedy. The problem, I think, would be one of definition. When movies are parsed by category, it becomes tricky; we’d have Best Western (not a motel), Best Musical, Best Romantic Comedy, and we’d never be done with it. Comedies deserve to be up there with everything else. Would Funny People have been a comedy? I think it’s a great drama. How about Inglourious Basterds? I didn’t think it was great, but it may have been a comedy.

RICHARD BRODY: But the question about comedy brings up one about acting in general; the prize, to borrow a cliché, often goes not to Best Acting but to most acting. Last year’s prize to Natalie Portman was a notable and wonderful exception.

QUESTION FROM JOHN SAPUNOR: You can’t discussoverlooked movies without mentioning 50/50.

DAVID DENBY: If I sound sour about The Golden Globes, it’s intentional. A bunch of hangers-on, for the most part, who file an occasional story, accept gifts from the studios, invent categories to keep everybody happy. The actors go sloshed to the show, so it can be funny, but god what a bunch of bums that association is.

RICHARD BRODY: The best thing about 50/50 was Anna Kendrick’s performance; she was like herself but more so; the hesitation and diffidence in her line readings, the pausing and searching in her gaze, was the movie’s one true thing.

QUESTION FROM JAY ANTANI: Speaking of overlooked movies, how about City of Life and Death? Gorgeous, brilliant movie.

DAVID DENBY: Yes, I liked it and though Seth Rogen held it together by registering his alarm and disgust at his friend’s plight, which relieved us of the need to be too high-minded about illness and possible death. I love Anna Kendrick, too.

DAVID DENBY: Richard, your move. I missed it.

RICHARD BRODY: City of Life and Death seemed to me to be bombastic propaganda.

DAVID DENBY: Oh dear.

QUESTION FROM S.P. MISKOWSKI: What has happened to the horror film for grown ups? In the 1960s and 1970s actors were nominated for serious roles in horror films like “The Exorcist” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” Today horror isn’t recognized, and I wonder if that has to do with its younger target audience. What do you think?

RICHARD BRODY: That’s a terrific question. David Cronenberg is a master of the horror film for grownups.

DAVID DENBY: One of the problems with the show is that there’s a paucity of established stars to anchor it. When I was a kid, they were Lancaster and Kirk Douglas; later the Beatty-Nicholson-Pacino group. You saw the disaster last year when they tried to put James Franco up there; he looked like wanted to be home reading a graphic novel or maybe a play by Genet—anywhere but on stage. Clooney and Julia Roberts figure as that kind of star; they should be more central.

RICHARD BRODY: A Dangerous Method seemed to me to be the kind of movie that would be Oscar catnip. I didn’t think highly of it. The real danger in the story—sexuality—doesn’t break out with the mind-bending force that it really has, and that Cronenberg seemed to want to suggest in “those scenes” with Keira Knightley. He had an idea; but the overall gentility of the film, the Masterpiece-Wiki version of psychoanalysis it offers, don’t help.

DAVID DENBY: Yeah, well, horror is a stable genre and a money-producing genre if you keep the budget down below $30m. It’s teenage girls, not boys, who propel it. They like going with dates, getting scared, and then comforted. The Twilight series is a kind of watered-down horror genre but very romantic—eros without actual fornication, commercially the right combination

RICHARD BRODY: That’s right; and I think we agree that Chronicle is a very smart update of the teen sci-fi genre. I loved it—including the last third, when it veers toward apocalypse.

QUESTION FROM JUSTIN BULVER: What do you think about Billy Crystal hosting, and what message does that send?

DAVID DENBY: You could explicate “A Dangerous Method” as a commentary on Cronenberg;’s earlier films, but I agree, there’s not enough life on the screen.

DAVID DENBY: I’m not sure there’s any message but anxiety that other hosts haven’t worked very well. He’s reliable.

RICHARD BRODY: David, since you brought up the stars on the broadcast, it’s worth talking about the hosting—and about why it seems to have changed. The reason why everyone seems to be on their best behavior—and why the hosts are supposed to be nice, too—is that the show is Hollywood’s biggest, and worldwide, advertisement for itself. Used to be that people would do wild things for their own reasons; now, careers would be killed by an Oscar-broadcast stunt. I really wanted to see Eddie Murphy, one of the wildest and most spontaneously inventive comedians around. Also, someone somewhere suggested Sarah Silverman; that would be fun.

QUESTION FROM RICHARD: Do you think that the Lars von Trier controversy at Cannes ruined both his and Kirsten Dunst’s chances of any nomination this year for Melancholia?

DAVID DENBY: That would be fun. She would terrify everybody. Aren’t we split in our expectations between wanting a somber, classy, respectful, art-loving event and wanting a juicy, scandalous, gossip-producing disaster?

RICHARD BRODY: Possibly, though, I think, indirectly. Who knows whether there are older voters who really might think, of course completely wrongly, that Von Trier actually has such unsympathetic political sympathies. More likely, it just made it harder for people to take him seriously; he was being a provocateur there, and he’s really just being a provocateur in his movies—this one and the others. His character is unified; I don’t think he thinks evil; I think he’s great at (that phrase again) advertising for himself.

DAVID DENBY: Possibly; it certainly didn’t help. He is such a fool in these matters. Except for a few sequences I wasn’t crazy about it, and I don’t think Richard was either, but, as you probably know, it did well in the critics groups. Did you really love Dunst? You didn’t get exasperated by that slow-moving vaporous style?

RICHARD BRODY: I like Kirsten Dunst a lot; should have been nominated for Best Actress for Marie Antoinette. In Melancholia, she did what was needed, but there was no element of surprise or invention.

DAVID DENBY: I still haven’t recovered from “The Anti-Christ,” with Gainsbourg and Dafoe screwing each other to death deep in the woods.

QUESTION FROM TODD: I was surprised “Tinker Tailor…” was shut out for both film and director.

RICHARD BRODY: The direction of Tinker Tailor seemed to me to be large-print; it reminded me of some German TV police drama in its sluggish explicitness.

QUESTION FROM INDIRA: Could their be an overhaul to the Foreign Language award to get better movies into consideration?

DAVID DENBY: Please, please see the six-hour BBC version from 1979, directed by John Irvin, and with a sublime performance by Alec Guinness as Smiley. My wife and I got hooked on it, and then on the sequel, “Smiley’s People,” also six hours. Intricacy, delicacy, a kind of puzzle that goes to the roots of loyalty, betrayal, despair. Great stuff. As Richard says, the direction of the mopvie was sluggish, bit it was still too compacted, as Anthony said in his review. You need to see Smiley’s thought-processes.

RICHARD BRODY: Absolutely; first, the initial nominations shouldn’t be made by the official cinema organizations of each country; foreign films should be nominated here, among films released, by an Academy board that sees lots of them.

DAVID DENBY: As you probably know, each country submits a film, which no doubt reflects political as well as commercial considerations. Funny that the Iranian authorities are both pleased by the success of “A Separation” and afraid of it in some way. They are so screwed up.

DAVID DENBY: Yes, Richard’s suggestion is an improvement.

RICHARD BRODY: Exactly; it makes it impossible for a film that’s in political opposition to the regime ever getting nominated from many countries.

RICHARD BRODY: I can think of some Iranian films that are even better than A Separation that would never, ever get past the local governing body.

DAVID DENBY: I don’t think the Iranians will nominate Panahi’s “This Is Not a Film,” which he shot under house arrest.

QUESTION FROM JUSTIN : Will this be the year Meryl Streep finally wins her 3rd Oscar? She’s been overdue for many years.

RICHARD BRODY: This Is Not a Film is at the head of the list.

DAVID DENBY: Yes, I suppose so. It’s hard to argue with the skill, the care, the detail, the sense of power instincts operating in senescence. Her eyes seem to see around corners, as if someone might challenge her. The rest of it is pretty bad.

RICHARD BRODY: Our colleague Michael Schulman hit the nail on the head regarding Meryl Streep: she should always win awards so that she can always give speeches; but I think the point is that she’s more spontaneous in her speeches than she ever is in her on-screen performances. It’s a style of acting that the Academy loves—the subordination of self to the character. But I think that Streep does it so well, so perfectly, that even the Academy thinks she enters the eerie zone.

QUESTION FROM TOGA: I’d have liked to see Mission: Impossible get a best picture nomination; it excelled within its genre.

DAVID DENBY: I like Streep best when she evil, as in “Prada,” and that thing from decades ago when she played a vicious writer of romance novels.

RICHARD BRODY: I liked Mission: Impossible, too. If there’s a new category of Best Action Film, it has to be balanced out by Best Inaction Film.

QUESTION FROM MICHAEL D. : Does Martin Scorsese deserve the Best Director award for “Hugo”? Or will the prize go to Michael Hazanavicius?

DAVID DENBY: Yes, Mission was fun in a kind of restless, keep-Tom-moving way; lots of falling and fear of falling. At times, it used action with the freedom of animation.

DAVID DENBY: Scorsese deserves it. “Hugo” is wonderful, full of invention, funny, adoring of old movies. And what a wonderful exploration of a child’s way of tunneling into corners, through passages, up stairways.

RICHARD BRODY: Scorsese deserves it more than Hazanavicius; the problem with The Artist (see David’s piece on the subject in the magazine this week) is its mildness. Early Hollywood was rowdy and wild, on-camera and off. There were Keystone Kops and Our Gang; there were bacchanalian parties. In The Artist, everyone seems pretty nice. In Hugo, even though it’s a film that kids can see and enjoy, there’s an implicit wildness—the making of films is a rough-and-ready adventure, full of mysteries that are equally mechanical and metaphysical.

QUESTION FROM GARY SWAFFORD : How long will the excellent cinema of South Korea be overlooked in the Best Foreign Language category? (i.e. “Poetry,” “Mother,” etc.)

RICHARD BRODY: Absolutely; there’s a Hong Sang-soo retrospective coming soon to Museum of the Moving Image, and any of his recent films would have deserved a Best Foreign-Language Film nomination.

DAVID DENBY: Yes, the nuttiness of Melies’s glass studio, with its foreground and background interplay, the wild creatures, the “natives” with spears. Fantasy, delirium, magic.

DAVID DENBY: Retrospectives are great, but if only we critics could drive audiences to see the movies when they come out, I would be happy.

RICHARD BRODY: I agree, David; I think that the new film of his, The Day He Arrives, will get a release.

QUESTION FROM RICH: Do you think Rooney Mara’s nod for Best Actress was worthy over Tilda Swinton, Charlize Theron, Olivia Colman etc?

DAVID DENBY: Looking forward to it.

RICHARD BRODY: Oh, absolutely; her command of gesture is splendid. That’s a very classical style of movie acting; we see it rarely, and it’s perfect for Fincher’s cinema.

DAVID DENBY: Rooney was good; so was Noomi Rapace in the Swedish version (I did a blog comparing the two). Rooney had some funny moments, like her quiver of disgust when Craig hesitates a moment in doing something on the computer. I’ve experienced that from my kids.

RICHARD BRODY: We have time for one more question.

QUESTION FROM HRSMITH: It is the start of Spring Training, what is each of your favorite movies ever about baseball?

DAVID DENBY: Ron Shelton’s movie with Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon (going blank on the title for a moment) was bittersweet and sexy and got the spirit of the game, which, as even ted Williams would admit, most of the time you fail. And “Moneyball,” of course. “Damn Yankees” had Ray Walston, as I remember, and Gwen Verdon and real fifties-musical swing to it.

THE NEW YORKER: Thanks to readers. And thank you to David Denby and Richard Brody!

RICHARD BRODY: Readers, thanks so much for your questions; I wish we could keep going. David, thanks so much; this was fun.

DAVID DENBY: Same time next year.

The New Yorker offers a signature blend of news, culture, and the arts. It has been published since February 21, 1925.